Thursday, 20 September 2012

My post on the shootings in France has brought tens of thousands of people to this site – but not to read my dull contribution. People are coming to read the comments from other readers.

Today’s development of the bomb squad descending on the al-Hilli house does not in itself worry me enormously. You may recall the massive terror scare that was ramped up when some Muslim students in Manchester were found to own a bag of sugar.

In fact we have the opposite phenomenon today, with the spook-fed “security correspondents” on TV lining up to tell us it is probably just everyday household stuff. This deviation from the standard Islamophobic “Muslims = bombs” narrative is so startling it makes me wonder why the “move along, nothing to see here” line is being taken so quickly.

My own security services sources insist that al-Hilli was not a person of current interest to the UK intelligence agencies and was not involved in anything clandestine. I have no reason to disbelieve them. On the other hand, the limited and confusing information in the media is almost entirely from official sources. I find it very strange indeed how little attention has been paid to the murdered French cyclist, and how easily it is presumed he was just a passerby. Surely it is as likely he was the intended victim and the al-Hillis the accidental witnesses?

Wednesday, 5 September 2012

Why Relations Despite the Scandals Didn't Change Much between Watergate and the 9/11 Bombings

The 9/11 attacks gave the FBI its biggest black eye in its history. While it had been starved of intelligence about the planned suicide bombing, and cut out of any response because of the belated disclosure of the spying by agent Robert Hanssen for the Soviets for fear that it would would somehow be leaked, the Bureau was still in the process of handing over the new leadership to Robert Mueller - delegating the domestic response to any such problems to the CIA which was most eager to regain the lead in the country's reponse to terrorism anywhere. Without any really important National Security Agency (NSA) intercepts of the messages the suicide bombers were exchanging in preparation for the attacks, the FBI had little chance of connecting the signal intelligence dots of what was afoot, especially since it had forced the retirement of its leading counterterrorist spook, John O'Neill.(1) The planned response was, consequently, most ham-fisted with fifteen unarmed CIA agents, under the direction of Soliticitor General Ted Olson's wife Barbara, it seems, trying to play copper with the 19 highjackers when they were dedicated to killing everyone they could, especially themselves. The only reason that the Bureau wasn't blamed more for the fiasco was because its causes were not easily discernable.(2)

The root of the problem went back to the NSA's near paranoia about anyone without a need to know, knowing of its very existence, much less its product, particularly since Director J. Edgar Hoover would not provide cover for its work. It had been that way since its inception, and it only got worse when it was caught out in the Watergate scandal, thanks to the investigation of Frank Church's Senate Intelligence Committee, that it had been eavesdropping illegally on private individuals through telecommunication companies for any information which might be relevant for it and any related agencies doing that work fully. "Pushed by Church," James Bamford has written in Body of Secrets, "the committee voted to make its report public - over NSA's vehement objections, and to the greatest displeasure of its Republican members." (p. 439) In the process, its Director, General Lew Allen was forced to resign, and the agency was obliged to live with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which made any such eavesdropping illegal, being now required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court if it wanted to listen to the communications of American citizens and permanent residents within the United States.

Of course, this made NSA the Bureau's official master in domestic matters, as it was expected to get some kind of input from the Bureau before any domestic eavesdropping. This restriction was impossible for NSA to maintain, given its worldwide capability to tap micro-wave messages, and to eavesdrop on what was going on in foreign embassies when it came to American residents. While the problem only surfaced when important Americans were involved, it was responsible for an increased sense of paranoia within the agency, leading its leadership constantly to be concerned about possilble leaks. This was best illustrated when Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman was Director, going wild when the media, especially The New York Times, leaked information about Illinois Congressman Edward Derwinski being investiaged for tipping off Soiuth Korean officials that its top spook in New York was about to defect by NSA monitoring his calls to Seoul (ibid.,October 27, 1977 issue), and President Carter's brother, Billy, was working as a business agent for´Gadaffi's Libyan government, aka Billygate, in the same fashion. (Bamford, pp. 380-1)

To avoid such embarrassment and controversy, future Directors became even more secretive and most devious about what was going on. NSA Director Air ForceGeneral Lincoln Faurer, Inman's successor, become so concerned about details leaking out about Reagan's covert government intruding into Swedish waters that he had Airman David Helmer defect to Stockholm in February 1984 so that there would be no paper trail about what his mission was. Hemler had a top secret clearance, and was stationed in Augsburg, Germany in its elite 6913 Electronic Security Squadron which knew all about signal intelligence communication in the Baltic, He told Swedish security what he apparently knew about what had been going on - what reinforced what statsminister Olof Palme's opponents, particularly Conservative Party leader Carl Bildt, had engaged in, especially sending the previous October a most provocative diplomatic note about it to Moscow. (3) Faurer added to the ruse by having John Lehman's US Navy send more attack submarines into the area to keep the ploy going.(4)

Whn Faurer learned, though, that the Reagan administration was serious about using it in a non-nuclear showdown with Moscow to end the Cold Warr at Sweden's expense, he resigned, only to be repaced by a more hard-line, covert operator, Army Lieutenant General William Odom. He had served as NSA Zbig Brzezinski's military assistant during the Carter administration, and was most noted for wanting to roll back Soviet power and influence across the board. Odom was obsessed by the potential leaking of NSA secrets by its personnel, earning the sobrique Captain Queeg among his subordinates, and even considered the President to be the biggest offender by divulging its secrets in covert operations.

Little wonder that when Ollie North wanted to do this in spades while working for Reagan NSA Bud McFarlane that Odom gave him what help he could to achieve the task.

Odom ordered John Wobensmith of its Information Systems Security Directorate to give North whatever help he needed, including two of its KY-40 scramblers.- what he did without North having to sign a receipt for having gotten them. The lap-top computers contained "...secure encryption chips so that he and his fellow conspirators could communicate secretly via e-mail while traveling." (Bamford, p. 391) An additional benefit was that it would be carried on without NSA having a clue about what was happening. The lap-tops were the crucial component of North's "FLASH" communication network would get round all the red tape required by official institutions, and permit his operatives to do missions like capturing the Palestinian terrorists who killed Leon Klinghofer on board the Achille Lauro (5) to making Palme pay with his life for having stopped the transfer of arms for Tehran in exchange for the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Of course, when Palme was assassinated, but the Soviets were not shown to have apparently done it, thanks to Moscow having been tipped off about the set up by the spies it had developed, and the countermeausres it had taken against any surprises triggering the planned non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War, all kinds of considerations became sensitive, and then alarming when Iran-Contra began unravelling. It was then that Director Odom became particularly worried about using information NSA had about Libya's alleged bombing of La Belle Discothéque in West Berlin on April 5, 1986 for a retaliatory attack on Gaddafi's capital Tripoli for fear that it would lead to what had happened in Stockholm the previous February 28th. Then when the C-123 carrying arms for the Contras was shot down over Nicaragua in the fall, the concerns resulted in murders of dangerous participants or their being forgotten about, especially the spies still unrevealed, destruction of key evidence about the plots, and defusing damaging evidence by rendering its sources immune from prosecution - what required the most strenuous efforts by the NSA and others.

The strain was immediately demonstrated when North put the highest priority on destroying incriminating evidence. He was sheading all the evidence he could lay his hands on in his office and that of the National Security Council, only to have his former boss, McFarlane, remind him of an even more important chore: "I hope to daylights that someome has been purging the NSA files on this episode." (6) This problem was greatly complicated by the fact that NSA had not given North's people just two KY.40 scamblers but fifteen KL-43 encryption devices whose codes had been changed every month, and had recorded everything they transmitted.The prospect of retrieving all the devices, and discovering what was within them made the possibility of what had really gone on most remote. In addition, the PROF notes between North and the new NSA Admiral John Poindexter about the operation were destroyed, but they had been copied by the agency's computer system, and were ultimately discovered.

Then there was all kinds of interecepts that NSA had normally collected from around the world. The fleet of attack submarines, especially the Parche, SSN-683, -which had been moving into position to sink Soviet hunter and boomer subs, once they started moving into launch position after the surprise assassination of Sweden's statsminster had occurred - had created a vast amount of communications which would become really troublesome if the real cause of Iran-Contra's illegalities came into focus. The double agents that the CIA had developed in the USSR during Operation Courtship to pin the set up on Moscow would become serious if any investigators suspected so. Also there was all the data which had been collected by the monitoring device that technician spy TAW had placed on the KGB communication center sourhqwar of Moscow, and what operation ABSORB disclosed about the movement of ICBMs along the Trans-Siberian railroad in preparation for a first strike upon America.(7)

Then Director Odom tried to pin the blame on Wobensmith for North's people having the KY-40 lap-tops. Wobensmith claimed that Odom was so positive about helping that he did noit even make North sign receipts when receiving them. Two years later, Wobensmith was suspended withouit pay for fifteen days by a NSA superior because of the oversight. and not instructing North how to properly use them, but an appeals board recommended that it be reversed and Webensmith reimbursed for his legal fees - what incensed Odom. "He believed that Wobensmith was responsible for casting the agency into the public spotlight, a rare and unforgiveable sin in NSA's secret city."(Bamford, p.391). As a result, he only received $1,229 for his legal fees, and was demoted in rank.

By scapegoating Wobensmith, Odom made it easier for the agency to keep Special Counsel Walsh investigating Iran-Contra at arms length. While Walsh was finally ablr to obtain over 100,000 pages of classified documents to begin trying defendants in the conspiracy, their success depended largely upon their use in the trail - what NSA General Counsel Elizzbeth Rinskopf doggedly opposed. "Her concern was not only the preveration of intelligence sources, but also the protection of her agency from embarrassment." (Bamford, p. 176) She insisted, for example, that McFarlane's message to North in his PROf notes, about wanting the NSA traffic files purged, be redacted. More important, Walsh had to resort to various expedients to hide NSA being the source of information most germane to successful prosecutions of the conspiracy and diversion charges in North's indictment, but Attorney General Richard Thornburgh refused to go along with the scheme.- what Bamford, by then the author of The Puzzle Palace about NSA, surprisingly explained on national TV was required to maintain its secret intelligence capability.

With NSA's role in Iran-Contra being effectively covered up, it was passed time for Odom to go, and he was replaced by Office of Naval Intelligence Director Vice Admiral William Studeman who was a soft-spoken copy of the former director.

In taking leave, though, Odom could not restrain himself from leaking more secret information by comparing .the Agency with his agency: "The CIA is good at stealing a memo off a prime minister's desk, but they're not much good at anything else." (Quoted from Body..., p. 474.) This was obviously a reference to stealing Palme's agenda in October 1985 for his scheduled meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in April 1986 - what allegedly included establishing a non-nuclear weapons zone in Scandinavia, and what was used by William Casey's CIA to justify his assassination. CIA resident in Stockholm Jennone Walker apparently got MI6 agent E. D.´Mack´' Falkirk in Oslo to steal the document.

The only problem with the theft was that it did not trigger a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War at Palme's expense - that was achieved by the Anglo-American leaders with Gorbachev themselves after the set up fizzled out because of countermeasures that Moscow took for the intended surprise, thanks to its spies around Washington.

During the next decade after the collapse of the USSR, the struggle within America's intelligence community was plagued by ferreting out the spies, especially CIA's Aldrich 'Rick' Ames, a process so damaging that it almost ended the Agency's existence while the Bureau was increasingly taking the lead in fighting terrorism, even overseas, thanks to copper Louis Freeh becoming its Director, and the wake up call it had received because of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993. The impact on NSA was devastating because of the continuous reduction of its enormous size, and a peacetime mission in a growing world economiy, as Air Force Director General Kenneth Minihan discovered. The Bureau went wild on fishing trips with NSA intercepts to find foreign companies which were engaging in illegal activities at the expense of legitimate American business. While Minihan gave the impression that he was a great promoter of agency transparency, he ran a very tight organization.

While Miniham's replacement, Air Force Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, had great plans for reforming NSA so its operators and funders could be happier about its performance, everything was put on hold to clear the air until the 9/11 attacks surprised everyone - making a bad situation much worse. A cause of the delay was the most belated discovery that Bureau's Special Agent Robert Hanssen had been another spy like the Agency's Ames - what Director Freeh compounded by immediately resigning, leaving the FBI naked to its enemies.(8)

DCI George Tenet cut the Bureau out of having anything to do in subduing the suspected highjackers of the four planes while its agents in the field were increasingly having trouble connecting the dots in all its criminal investigations.(9) Moreover, the NSA did not accept Rick Taylor's recommendation about implementing his system called Thinthread which would allow it to see the head notes of foreign e-mails entering the States while the Brueau was forced by the FISA court to keep its data gathering more separated from its criminal investigations.(10)

The results would be the 9/11 disasters where both the failings of the Brureau and NSA would be paramount, but this time the FBI was more exposed in the fallout, and would resort to more drastic attempts to fix it, as we shall see in the concluding article.

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Reference

1. For more, see this link: http://flyingcuttlefish.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/oneill-a-voice/2. For a more complete explanation, see Trowbridge H. Ford, "The Prelude: US Intelligence - 11 September 2001, Eye Spy magazine, Issue Eight 2002, pp. 26-33.3. Svenska Dagbladet, April 27, 1983.4. For more about this, see the awards that the US Navy's submarines received during 1984 and 198 in Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind's Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, p. 426.5. Peteer Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America, pp. 140-1.6. Quoted from Lawrence E. Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, p. 8.7. Pewte Earley, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of aldrich Ames, pp. 117-8.8. Ford, op. cit., p.26ff.9. James Bamford, The Shawdow Facory: The Utra Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. p. 108ff.19. Ibid., p. 44ff.

Enlightenment

Do you feel like you're living in some Orwellian nightmare? Or perhaps you feel as if you're plugged into The Matrix? Well if so, you've come to the right place. No matter how messed up you thought the world was, by the time you've finished reading some of the things I've found on my travels in Cyberspace you'll realise that 1984 was just a typo!

A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is
NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk when they are off their heads. To understand what codshit is watch the film Human Traffic.

Comments are welcome, but before you waste perfectly useful energy abusing me please take a moment to reflect on the basic right we all have to express ourselves!

Please remember that I am not telling you what to think or believe, take everything you read here with a large grain of salt!

Wisdom

If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent... usually... It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.

So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.

Let there be no doubt that the people of the free world are engaged in a war... In the next few years, we are either going to see the people of the free world rise up against these fascists, now setting the stage for global war, or we are going to see the end of democracy as we know it with martial law the end result.
.: David Shayler :.

Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
.: Albert Einstein :.